You are fortunate to have had a writer of this skill in your language, having come from your continent to bring his great gift to the world.

And the axolotls... one can understand Cortázar's fascination... though in his times they were not as close to natural extinction as they now are; back then the captive creatures still probably had relatives living in the two lakes in Mexico...

Hungry leucistic axolotl has lunch. (You say to yourself, It's never going to be able to manage that big clump of seaweed: and then... down the hatch. It's vacuum-suction action.)

Alas, the natural habitat of the axolotl is pretty much a memory. "They are native to a pair of lakes in the mountains of central Mexico," says axolotl lover TheaSinensisSepenti. "One of the lakes has been drained to make way for urban development and the other is now a series of polluted canals﻿ in downtown Mexico City where the last of the wild axolotl will be eaten by introduced fish/die of pollution in the next couple years. Fortunately they have been bred in large numbers for decades now, for use in scientific experiments and can now be found in pet shops across the globe."

curtisroberts (http://curtisroberts.livejournal.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Julio Cortázar: Axolotl":

Seeing "Axolotl" posted made my heart go way up. This was the first Cortazar story I ever read (quite a long time ago in a very good literature course in high school) and, obviously, it's one that can affect your whole life and way of looking at things.

I hadn't re-read it for a long time because it's utterly haunting and it really stayed with me, both in waking life and in dreams. It gets under your skin like very few things do. I always thought that it would be very difficult to illustrate effectively. I now know that I was mistaken on that score.

This post has now been up in two different languages in four different versions (the horror!), and hopefully all the little rich-text bugs who were running around in it all night have now been exterminated.

Now I understand why the axolotl is an endangered species, I think, maybe.

From now on I will never leave home without one. (Or perhaps with one, for that matter.)

(And Curtis, all the little axolotls love you dearly for being so very nice...)